Reception Theory, New Humanism, and T. S. Eliot

Abstract

T. S. Eliot has been a major, if challenging, figure for students of reception and the Classical Tradition, and is implicated in an important debate on historicist versus aestheticist models of reception study. This article challenges assumptions about his position on, and practice of, reception. The politics implicit in theorists’ references to Eliot is teased out, and the position he took in response to inter-war New Humanism is shown to be predominantly historicist. An analysis of The Family Reunion (1939) then suggests that the Modernist-poetic approach he therefore took to the Oresteia broke so decisively with existing models of reception as to have called the fact of reception into question. The play is also shown to build on H.D.’s experiments in translation and to respond to Aeschylean receptions by Robinson Jeffers and Eugene O’Neill. It is further suggested that it anticipates several aspects of recent Reception Theory.